The amount of data available to information seekers has grown astronomically. The proliferation of information sources on the Internet and on private networks provides challenges in a variety of areas but especially in areas related to searching for specific pieces of data among all those available. A closely related problem is the need to present located information in a manner that allows a human user to quickly identify useful pieces of needed information in an intuitive and logical manner.
A number of tools have been created to assist human users in the tasks of searching for and sorting through information stored in computer systems. Among the most prevalent are graphical environments and web browsers that have been adapted for information searching. Even using these tools, however, information searching and sorting can be a complex and arduous endeavor.
A number of factors, either alone or in combination, can contribute to difficulty for a human user to find desired information using a computer interface such as a graphical user interface (“GUI”) or a web browser. Among those factors are large numbers of items in search results; terse or unhelpful descriptions of results; relatively small or limited areas within which to display results, either within a window or on an entire screen; or the inability to present a complete set of search results, usually necessitating the placement of at least one potentially desired result item on another page of results to which a user must navigate.
Often, interfaces for search engines are based upon web browsers and use static style sheets for displaying a name of a data item, a description of the item, and a location, such as a uniform resource locator (“URL”) for the item. Formatting for results is usually the same for each item in a result set and for every user. Generally, there is a trade-off between the ability to show information to the user with a useful level of detail and the amount of space that is available to present information.